About Hakodate Feel

Hakodate Feel is an instrumental music project from Hakodate, a port town at the southern tip of Hokkaido. Every track is written for a real place or a real person in this city’s past, and every track comes with an article.

I’m Yosuke Nozawa. I write the music, I write the articles, and I take the photographs.

Why a musician writes about history

The first song I made here is called “Aoyagi Woodpecker.” It’s about the poet Takuboku Ishikawa, who lived in Hakodate for 132 days in 1907 and spent the rest of his short life writing about them. The song is 132 measures long.

When I was younger, I would have written that song from a book. This time I didn’t. I read what he wrote, then I went and stood where he stood — the shore he wrote about, the slope where he lived, the cape where he is buried. Some of what I found contradicted what I had assumed. The statue of him on the beach faces northeast, away from the town, and I had spent months believing it faced the other way.

That turned out to be the method. Read, go, check, and write down what’s actually there — including the parts where I got it wrong. Read the first one.

Before that

I started playing the violin at three, following my father and my older brother. At the time I took it completely for granted. It never felt like a choice, and for a long time I didn’t think of it as anything I had decided to do.

As a student I went to Boston to study music. I played chamber music and sat in on sessions with the other students there. What stayed with me was how their playing was joyful and, at the same time, carried who they were. The city, the musicians, the way a room sounded at two in the morning — all of it became part of me.

Then I stopped playing for about seven years. Hakodate Feel is what I made when I started again.

Three records

Three albums I keep going back to, and why.

George Benson, “Breezin’” — a different instrument from mine, but his expressiveness floored me. It set a standard I still measure against.

“Sister Act Collection” — I came to it through the film. That quality of performance is still one of the reasons I make music at all.

Toshiki Soejima, “Live at Grapefruit Moon” — I found this one as an adult, and was pulled in by the urban, polished sound.

Listen

One thing I haven’t done yet

I want to put on a night concert in a hall here in Hakodate, built in the Taishō era, with everyone — players and audience alike — in the clothes of that time. And I want travelers from abroad in the room too, hearing this city’s past where it happened.

It hasn’t happened yet. That’s why it’s here.

How this site is made

The photographs are mine, taken in Hakodate. The sources for each article are listed at the bottom of that article, and where I’ve only been able to consult secondary sources, I say so.

I’m not a historian. When I find that I’ve written something wrong, I correct it and leave a note saying what changed. If you find something wrong before I do, tell me — the fastest way is a message to @hakodatefeel on Instagram.